


Starships and Barbie Dolls

by lodessa



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gender Roles, Growing Up, Sexism, Social Commentary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-15
Updated: 2010-03-15
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Equality is still a work of progress even after we reach the stars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starships and Barbie Dolls

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think of this unnamed woman as the one who tells McCoy: “Sit down or else I'll make you sit down.”

In the waning afternoons, while her little brother was taking his afternoon nap and mother was catching up on her soaps, she used to smuggle them out into the yard. They weren't hers, these shining proxies of technology and space and adventure. Any sort of transport has always been a boy's toy. It didn't matter if it was a train set or a boat or space ships like these. Her toys were nothing like them. Toy cars built for girls did not even have working wheels. Surveys showed that men liked spaceships and women found them off putting. Why should it be any different with little girls? In the space of an hour he would wake screaming and she would be called for to mind him while her mother started supper, but for a tiny slice of time she could pretend. The plastic hull gleamed like it was made of something better; she liked to run her fingers over its smooth surface and imagine the real thing. Sometimes, in her head, she acted out scenarios from the boys' cartoons. She always played the part of the Federation captain. She was the hero of her own adventures, rescuing beautiful alien princesses with her daring and resolve. These fantasies grew stale quickly, however. Later, she would feel restless, watching another episode of the same old formula. 

_What if she wasn't a princess?_

_What if she wasn't beautiful?_

_What if she rescued the captain instead?_

Under the covers at night, she would try to imagine new stories. Her Barbie ™ dolls would engage on adventures which their inflexible limbs were not intended for. Teresa served as her stand in, a Starfleet Captain who saved the day using her brains as well as her strength of will. Once, her father had come home on leave and brought with him a collector's edition Orion Barbie that he and her mother had quarreled about. She would sometimes have Teresa side with this unnamed alien with her emerald green skin, or the Vulcan doll T'yana, or Sonita with her enormous slanted eyes. Sometimes Barbie, the real one with her blonde hair and blue eyes, played the villain. Tassa, the blue skinned Andorian Barbie with her antennae, usually got cast as Teresa's first officer. 

The alien Barbies were all from her father and his brief trips home. He never stayed long before going back out there, and he spent the time he did staring up at the sky most nights. He brought little starships for her little brother and dolls for her and all kinds of alien clothes and art that her mother secretly hated but pretended to like until he left once more. She secretly wondered what his life was like out there. Sometimes she'd close her eyes and imagine he was taking her with him. When her father was away he seemed so anxious to get home, despite the face that he spent his time there pining for the stars. She wouldn't be like that. She never watched a single starry sky, but she knew she would love being out there. With her by his side, her father would never be homesick again and they would leave everything she knew behind.

Of course, those were just dreams. There came the day where she packed all her toys away and decided she didn't like pink anymore. Her mother didn't even make a pretense of watching either of them anymore. In the evenings, she was always over at one friend or another's, coming home smelling of liquor and ashes. When he visited, her father still brought dolls. He always seemed surprised to see her almost a woman grown. It was clear he didn't know what to do with a daughter he couldn't hold in his arms and win over with candy. He spent most of the days he was home teaching her brother new alien games; he still stared up at the sky every night.

She started seeing her first boyfriend because he worked on cars and she liked the thrill of his motorcycle at reckless speeds. He broke up with her because she became a better mechanic than he was and she outraced him every time they rode. A man wanted a woman he could take care of; that's what he told her. She started to try being heartbroken, but she had better things to do and soon gave it up. Her school counselor called her into his office about her schedule. Was she sure she really wanted to take all these hard science and technology classes? She was. Oh, did she want to be a nurse? No she absolutely did not. Why not a doctor, she almost asked him, but she knew the answer. That much training was a waste on a pretty young lady like herself, surely in a few years she'd want to settle down and have a family. She pressed her lips together and told him these were the classes she was taking, unless he could find something wrong with her prerequisites.

When she brought home the permission forms for the interplanetary student exchange program, she was disappointed to be be told no. She was not surprised about it though. She was enraged when her mother pushed her brother to go. Ships and space were for boys and men. Still, she lay awake at night wondering what it would have been like. Would she have made friends with an Andorian girl? Would this friend have looked like her old doll? What kinds of technology did they have there? Her brother was useless. He spent every conversation while he was there crying about how much he wanted to be home.

She didn't see her mother's suicide coming. She was wrapped up with books and machines. Still, it fell to her to go through her mother's things after they'd taken her body and the pills she hadn't even finished swallowing. She'd never known that her mother had been in Starfleet. Reading through her mother's journals, she discovers that her mother loved it. She hadn't hated all those alien gifts; they had made her sad because they reminded her of what she'd lost. She had lost the stars and ships and far off planets, and for what? For two children she would hardly bring herself to raise without bitterness. It had always seemed that their mother favored her brother, but here she mostly wrote of her. Her mother's guilt filled countless pages. How could she encourage her to dreams that would someday be ripped away? Everybody knew that men stared up at far off ships and knew their heart's desire was out there, but women wanted what was right there on the ground. You couldn't have both.

This was the inheritance from her mother and it seemed inevitable and looming, as she had to put off her application to Starfleet (or anywhere else) and take care of her brother. 

Eventually, she was able to find work as a mechanic. She suspected that the man who hired her wasn't even paying attention to the skills she possessed, but eventually he picked up on them them and stopped making her answer the phones. This did not, of course, stop him from asking her out or making inappropriate comments. He wasn't the only one to be interested, but she was still holding on to the dream of something more and men were the surest way to get tied down here. The valet job she worked nights was harder to acquire, men just didn't feel comfortable handing over their BMWs to a girl according to most prospective employers. She finally found a Ladies Club that was willing to take on a female valet. The tips were actually pretty good because all these fancy ladies felt sorry for the little girl working a man's job. Father was still sending home money, so theoretically she didn't need to work so hard or at all, but she knew deep inside of her that once she started staying home and living off a man's income it would never stop. So she worked herself to the bone at two jobs and spent what little free time she had working on wrecks she picked up for cheap and resold for a multiple times what she'd put into them. She didn't have much time for the brother she was legally in charge of, but he was a teenage boy and didn't have much time for her either.

In the months leading up to her brother's majority, she debated whether she should apply to study engineering or piloting with Starfleet. She was a shoe-in for the prior, but she's always wanted to fly those ships. Wasn't allowing her past to determine her future course at Starfleet just another way of settling? She went to go talk to admissions counsellors. They were mostly useless. It seemed only the scum of the fleet were engaged in admissions. So she did some research on her own. It turned out that, if you stayed an extra year at the academy, it was possible to study to distinctly different fields given the appropriate aptitude test scores and grade point average. She applied the next day, crossing her fingers. 

It was the first time in her life that no one tried to talk her out of her dreams. Her classes were hard, and she was one of the only women in her piloting classes, but for the first time in her life she could feel her dreams becoming something tangible. The men (boys really) around her liked to talk wistfully about what they were going to do someday, out there. They saw this time as a inconvenient obstacle on the way to their heart's desire. But she was loving every moment here already. She loved flight simulators and piloting shuttles and learning about alien mechanical engineering. She really did become friends with her Andorian roommate, Tanah. Tanah looked nothing like the Andorian Barbie of her childhood. She was softer, rounder. Her body was different than human bodies: different shapes, different textures. Her skin wasn't just blue; it was luminous. Tanah was nothing like what she'd imagined and she loved her for it. 

She loved Starfleet Academy. Between her love of it and her friendship with Tanah, she didn't crave anything more. Still, finally getting out into space was unbelievably better. The feel of the great ship around her was exhilarating, better than the simulations by far. Space, space was all her wishes fulfilled and no one was ever going to take that away from her. She heard the men around her complain. They complained about the food. They complained about the quarters. They complained about their duties. Ships at a distance held every boy and man's dream; ships up close and personal were just another inconvenience to them. She didn't feel that way. The closer it all came, the more she relished it. She thought of her father, still yearning for the stars and the earth in their turn, craving wherever he was not. Tanah called her a baby when she shared these observations with her. Men were always like that, no matter what planet they hailed from. 

There were always men who wanted to test her, see if she would give way under pressure. They never succeeded. She was not her mother, who crumpled and failed. 

_She was not domesticated._

_She was not broken._

_She was great at her job._

The stars and the ship and the future were hers. Theirs, Tanah corrected her. Heaven help the man or woman who tried to stand in their way. 

She did not visit her former home for many years. In the end it was her father's death that brought her back there. Her brother had long since married, a quiet girl who had grown into an even quieter woman, and his daughter was almost ready to start school already. She looked long and hard for an appropriate gift for this niece she had never met. In the end she selected a model ship. It shined even through its packaging and when the little girl opened it her eyes lit up. Things could change, even in the course of one person's lifetime. She rested her head on Tanah's shoulder and they watched the little girl, lost in her own fantasies. She smiled when she realized that the child had cast herself as the Princess-Captain; that was one she had never thought of herself.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the where_no_woman New Year Drabblefest, using prompt #2 - Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. 
> 
> I wrote this from the questions I had about the Earth we see in the reboot, with its Budweiser and it's farm animal/hick jokes. I also drew from my own questions about Winona Kirk and the feeling that she had to choose between Jim and space. I wanted to write about how little the Earth we see in the reboot has changed. I wanted to see the soft well intentioned sexism of plenty. I wanted to write about the difference between the outward face of humanity presented by Starfleet and the every day experience of plain old folks. Star Trek is a utopian fantasy, but the world we see isn't there yet.


End file.
